Thomas Gold Biography

Born May 22, 1920, in Vienna, Austria; died of heart disease, June 22,
2004, in Ithaca, NY. Scientist. Through his maverick research at Cornell
University, Thomas Gold first came to prominence in 1948 when he
published, with fellow scientists, the now discredited
"steady-state" theory, which proposed that the universe
continuously creates new matter even as it loses it. The theory's
eventual discrediting led to the validation of the Big Bang theory. Twenty
years later, he published a paper explaining pulsars, a hitherto
unexplained phenomenon detected by radio telescopes. It was received with
some hostility but eventually won universal acceptance. In the 1960s, he
sat on the National Aeronautic and Space Administration's (NASA)
space science advisory panel. In the 1980s, he was a proponent of unmanned
spaceflight. Finally, in his 1998 book,
The Deep Hot Biosphere,
he proposed that there is no such thing as "fossil" fuels,
but rather that oil products were formed along with the earth and
therefore exist in almost unlimited quantity. He suggested that life might
be found on Mars and other planets from subterranean drilling. He was also
a gifted and daring sportsman, enjoying water and downhill skiing and
amateur tightrope walking. In 1964, he was elected to the Royal
Astronomical Society and later to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Gold was the son of a Jewish businessman in Vienna, Austria. His family
moved to Berlin when he was an adolescent, and later fled to England from
the Nazis. His father's gift of a watch, which Gold took apart and
reassembled, led to his interest in technology. He earned a
master's degree in mechanical sciences from Cambridge University
with a thesis that proposed that the ear acts as an oscillator
of sound. Years later it was discovered that minute hair cells working
with vibrating membranes do indeed serve this function in the ear. After
he was briefly interned at the start of World War II due to his Austrian
origin, his degree got him a job on a top secret British radar project.
During his internment, he struck up a friendship with fellow prisoner
Herman Bondi, with whom he would later cowrite his
"steady-state" paper. He taught at Trinity College,
Cambridge, from 1947 to 1951, was an assistant at the Royal Greenwich
Observatory from 1952 to 1956, and then was hired by Harvard University in
1957 to teach astronomy. In 1959, he accepted a directorship in
Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
There he pushed for American supremacy in the space race, and as chairman
of the astronomy faculty he hired the astronomer Carl Sagan, later a
famous author on cosmology and host of the popular television documentary
series
Cosmos.

Gold's "steady-state" theory on the universal
continual creation of matter—which argued that the universe is
infinite and its matter constantly replenished—was presented at the
Royal Astronomical Society in Edinburgh in 1948 to generally skeptical
peers, but it provoked fervent discussion and research into measuring
microwave radiation that resulted in strengthening the Big Bang theory. In
the face of mounting evidence of a violent and instantaneous creation of
the universe, even Gold began to view his alternative theory as doubtful.
But in 1968, his research into the slowing down of a pulsing star in the
Crab Nebula gave rise to his well-received theory of spinning neutron
stars. While under contract at NASA in the 1960s, he proposed that the
moon had been pockmarked by meteor bombardments that accounted for its
powdery surface. Fearful that a manned spacecraft might sink deep into the
surface of the moon upon landing, the agency sent the unmanned Surveyor on
a pre-Apollo troubleshooting mission. Though the powder's depth was
found to pose no danger to spacecraft or astronauts, Gold was proved
correct about its existence.

His next daring theory emerged as a result of the energy crisis of the
1970s. With an ambitious drilling project in Sweden, he sought to prove
that hydrocarbons are not of biological origin and therefore could exist
in huge supply in deeper subterranean depths. Gold proposed that these
substances—oil, gas, and especially methane—flow from
gigantic reserves toward the earth' surface, where our limited
drilling capabilities are able to exploit them. The deeper we can drill,
he argued, the more we will find. Though his discovery of an oily evidence
was ridiculed by critics, two decades later he published
The Deep Hot Biosphere,
a book that rehashed his theory. According to the
Washington Post,
Gold said, "Most men can seldom accept even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions which
they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly
taught to others, and which they have woven thread by thread into the
fabric of their lives."

Gold died of heart disease on June 22, 2004, in Ithaca, New York, at the
age of 84. He was divorced from Merle Tuberg Gold, whom he married in
1947, and is survived by three daughters from that marriage. He is also
survived by his second wife, Carvel Beyer Gold, whom he married in 1972,
their daughter, and six grandchildren.

Sources

Independent
(London), June 29, 2004, p. 35.

Los Angeles Times,
June 26, 2004, p. B17.

New York Times,
June 24, 2004, p. A25.

Washington Post,
June 24, 2004, p. B6.

—D. László Conhaim

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